The 30-year-old actor was hospitalised after seven days of substance abuse which left him looking “as if somebody had beaten the s**t out of me” and says he was “drowning” after his split from Jeff Leatham as well as the death of his mother, Dana Denise Mitchell.
In an interview with the 25th anniversary edition of Attitude magazine, he said: “I got married and that didn’t work out. That was extremely public and heart-breaking, and right when that was going on, my mom died. I got so heavily involved with drugs and alcohol to mask the pain I was feeling that I couldn’t even make some decisions for myself. I was drowning in my own shit.”
Recalling the hellish state he was in at the hotel, he added: “I locked myself in a hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills for seven days and was found in my room with these bruises all over my body. It looked as if somebody had beaten the s**t out of me. I couldn’t walk, so I was falling everywhere.
“I almost ruptured my kidney; ended up in the hospital, ended up on 5150 [a temporary and involuntary] psyche hold. I was on such a destructive path that I could not function.”
The ‘Teen Wolf’ star went on to recall an incident where he was fired from a comedy show as he was “dead in the eyes” from his substance use and he is adamant that the studio made the “best decision in the world” to get rid of him because he was in no fit state to be working.
He said: “At that point, I fell apart. My brain broke. I was doing this massive comedy for a studio, showed up to work and got fired on the first day. They said I looked as if I had ‘dead in my eyes’ – and I did. I think it was the best decision in the world to fire me.”
